Return to the Source

On a desolate stretch of Spring Street, beyond downtown’s high-rise chessboard and the pungent crush of Chinatown, the only signs of life besides the occasional passing sedan or pacing yard dog are pink balloons, tied to the facade of an old brick warehouse and tugged by an intermittent wind.

Even without balloons, the stout red-brick building has long resembled some sort of out-of-season blossom. Which is what this structure--the Woman’s Building--was in its heyday: the outgrowth of a stubborn life force pushing out of inhospitable, if not impossible, circumstances.

On this glowing Sunday afternoon, there is not just one bloom to marvel at on the building’s grounds, but many, a garden of activists, teachers, mothers, performance artists, poets. Art pieces themselves, they’re draped in bright silks or dress-down denim, hair freshly hennaed, gelled or cropped close, bodies ornamented with Bakelite bangles, tattoos or cat’s-eye glasses.

Nearly 100 women (and a smattering of men) ascend the crumbling concrete steps. And when they squeeze through the doors, they reignite the spare interior simply with their presence.

Many of these women grew up here, and the ideas that flourished inside have lived on in their works and memories. Founded by graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, art historian Arlene Raven and artist Judy Chicago, whose project “The Dinner Party” sought to recognize women’s achievement and expression in history, the Woman’s Building became a North Star on a dream map for women who were looking to redefine their lives and work.

Until it closed 10 years ago and was converted to artists’ studios, it was a safe haven for those embarking on political and/or artistic endeavors and desiring a woman-centered environment in which to do so. And its history--rich, splintered, groundbreaking--is the subject of a new book, “Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman’s Building” (City Lights) by Terry Wolverton--a good enough excuse for a long overdue party.

Just as they once traveled great physical distances, often from small towns in wide-open states, now, decades later, these women have journeyed from university posts, nonprofit chairmanships, their artist studios and their backyard barbecues to pay tribute and again reassess.

A Collage of Memories

Bits of memories are offered up, forming a collage: “Remember the dances on the third floor? Consciousness-raising on the railroad tracks? Dianic Mechanics? When we tore a whole car apart and then did performances about it?”

Back in 1973, the plan was to create a space that would offer instruction and discussion in a wide range of disciplines--creative writing, graphic design, performance art, video and visual arts. The descriptor “public center,” Wolverton explains in the book’s introduction, “signified the wish to make a place for women artists in the mainstream, while ‘women’s culture’ revealed more subversive intentions.” Here women would be encouraged to delve into a range of studies often cast to the margins--women’s spirituality, lesbian politics and making art that reflected a woman’s point of view, unfiltered by male sensibilities.

As well as creating a meeting place, the founders developed an alternative program--a philosophy of spirit--for women’s art education. Called the Feminist Studio Workshop, or FSW, its goal was to link the pressing issues of the women’s movement with a basic arts and art history curriculum. The center grew to offer a range of resources--galleries, theater groups, a Sisterhood Bookstore annex, an office for the National Organization for Women, a coffeehouse and a feminist travel agency.

It was a place to “experience oneself as both woman and artist,” writes Wolverton, who tried on incarnations ranging from student to teacher to executive director in her 13-year association. For women, she explains, the center was an antidote to a culture that “proved to be a funhouse mirror, distorting and diminishing, a surface into which you walked and then disappeared.”

It was a community--lesbian, straight, artists, activists--that encouraged all involved to develop an “authentic voice,” says Wolverton. And it provided an audience eager to hear and challenge those voices.

This late summer party is no different, observes Eloise Klein Healy, watching conversation fly. “It’s like a sauna in here!” she continues, fanning herself with one of the pink programs outlining the day’s events--an opening ritual, music, readings and remembrances. “But it always was. When it would fill up and things got going, it was always like this. This buzz,” she says, chuckling.

Healy, a poet and the former chair of the MFA creative writing program at Antioch University, first caught wind of the Woman’s Building in on a flier in 1975. She stayed 15 years, doing everything from washing windows and hanging Sheetrock to serving on the board. “I didn’t know any women writers at the time,” she recalls, “I was kind of floundering. Didn’t know what to do. I had been taught by a lot of literature professors, not writers.” Certainly not women who were busy shoving away boundaries. Here, women set about rewriting old texts and ideas, chapter after chapter.

Spirits of the Past

Reunions are full of ghostly images, and one struggles with tricks of memory. Who was that person I meant to be? Who is this person I am now? Did I hold up my end?

“Sometimes I think, ‘My God did that all happen?’ ” says photographer Maria Karras, delivering her testimony into a dented microphone. “It’s very spooky when you think about the sprits that brought us here.” Women traveled from Missouri, Virginia, Kentucky, New Mexico and Canada, she recalls, providing “the labor that built these walls.”

There is lots to be proud of, says Pat Akers, an executive recruiter and tai chi teacher, her hands shoved into the back pockets of her jet-black jeans, surveying the room as if it were an expanse of land. Old faces have jarred some stowed memories. “It’s like a homecoming!” she enthuses. “Back then, in L.A. you had two types of feminists--there were the ‘Dinner Party’ women and the Woman’s Building women. In 1979, when the ‘Dinner Party’ project was finished, a lot of us came down to the Woman’s Building.”

Akers was involved in two Woman’s Building-based projects--the Women’s Graphic Arts Center and Women Against Violence Against Women, which was one of the key voices in a high-profile protest of the Rolling Stones’ 1976 album “Black and Blue” ad campaign, which featured a battered woman. “We brought that billboard down.”

Seeing the women who’ve come together to celebrate the building’s history, says Akers, “you remember that sense of community. It was feminism in its best traditional sense: to honor ourselves as women. Being here forced me to find that part of myself. It really helped me to describe and define what I wanted.”

Karen Sterling, now a counselor at Hamilton High School in Los Angeles, wasn’t at the Woman’s Building during the heady, crazy ‘70s but was there at the end to carefully crate up the evidence of its creative output--posters and other printed ephemera, which went to the Smithsonian Institution, and performance videos and a library that went to Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. “What they have up here now, the posters? Just a twinkle of an eye of what this place produced ... all under the auspices of feminism.”

Offering thanks, performer Anna Homler sings and plays a toy accordion. Healy reads poetry from volumes that in some way, large or small, were put together by the Woman’s Building. And a special guest, the folksinger Phranc, bounds up to the stage in trademark flat-top and stovepipe jeans, waving her old FSW card and proudly showing off her old bad mood. “I had a really good look back then. Angry. And if you crossed my path and you were straight....” She strums through the floating ellipses on a worn guitar, the music far from angry now, a counterbalance to her former self.

“When I dropped out of school at 17 to become who I wanted ... I came here. You were my family, my community and my high school. It was here that I learned about tolerance.” She leans into the first lines of a song, “I respect you, I really appreciate the things you do....”

Reflecting on the Journey

Conversations bounce off the freshly whitewashed walls. Women stand amid bountiful wrought-iron tables that are draped in pink cloths, strewn with grapes, rose petals and almonds.

For all of the hugs and tears, what’s been rolling around many minds are questions: Did they succeed? Had the Woman’s Building been an absurd journey? Just a tangent?

To Wolverton, the day’s flurry of longing remembrances and passion suggests that what was started isn’t finished, that there is, in the gathering, the insurgent power of not just a movement but of bold, original thought.

Florence Rosen takes her turn before the microphone. Her red metallic eyeglass frames match the cherry socks peeking out of her Birkenstocks. “Back in 1978, I knew this was cooking down here, but I was cooking at home,” she recalls with a wistful smile. “At 50, I would see these women communicating and confident. I didn’t have that. I wanted to have that feeling.”

That “feeling.”

Indeed, the Woman’s Building seemed to grace those who entered with magic powers--those of confidence and clarity. For many women, the experience opened a passageway, led them to begin to understand they could be anything they wanted to be.

And more important than any structure, any building, was one understanding: As Wolverton writes, “The truth is that there was not one, but two Woman’s Buildings. This building was intrinsically the foundation for the second--that grander gleaming manse of your imagination.”

Terry Wolverton will read from and sign “Insurgent Muse” this evening at 7 at the Central Library, Mark Taper Auditorium, 5th & Flower streets, downtown Los Angeles. Reservations: (213) 228-7025.